External Disk Permission

Hey guys. I have a strange problem. I have a PC that runs XP that of course literally died this morning. Nothing. Anyway, I rip out the hard drive and put it in an enclosure for transfer. The problem is I need the data in "My Documents" which you all know is famous for permission issues. So the question is how do I change the permissions of this drive so that I can copy all the data? I cannot boot from it as it is NTFS, XP, and USB. It's a laptop drive so I can't just throw it into another machine ... and I don't want to mess with third party bootloaders and all that jazz. Any suggestions? Thanks a lot

bump :/

Without more info it's difficult to advise you. How are you trying to read the drive and on which machine with what operating system?

For example: Are you trying to mount the drive on your Mac? Is your Mac running Leopard? Snow Leopard?

Regards.

Sorry for the lack of information.

Here we go.

I had a laptop that died, which was running XP Pro. I took the hdd out and put it into an enclosure. I have mounted it in a Macbook Pro Running Snow Leopard. I can see all my files there but when I attempt to copy or open them I "do not have permission".

Now, I have tried to throw the XP drive into another machine and boot from it. It will not boot in regular mode. I tried safe mode. Worked. Tried to recopy some information onto a different external hard drive. It copied. When I try to access that data from the new mac I get the same error. I also tried changing permission to the external disk as well as to the original XP hard drive from safe mode. Apparently those settings do not "save" after changing them as when I go back and look at the permissions tab after I edited them, it still says read only. I am aware that is to be expected as I was in "safe mode," which is a read-only mode.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Many important business files are on this drive. It's killing me that I can see them but cannot access them.

Thanks in advance, guys.

OK, thanks for posting back with info.

Snow Leopard has the ability to R\W to NTFS partitions, however, it's not turned on by default. You either have to turn it on via the terminal or use this small application "ntfsMounter" which will do it for you. It's a free download and as far as I can tell it works without problems. Download from here.

Once your NTFS drive is properly mounted with the ntfsMounter.app you should be able to copy files from the drive to another location. If for some reason, the files remain read only, you may have to log on your Mac using the ROOT account in order to get at them.

How to enable the ROOT user account in Snow Leopard: LINK

Let us know how it went.

Regards.

Alright ... I am sorry for the late response.

I did all of the above and the read/write mode is cool and works well (although I had to enable it from the terminal because the small ntfs mounter program didn't work at all ... strange)

However, the problem is not fixed ... even in root user mode it tells me that I "do not have permission to perform this action" when trying to open or copy a needed file from the drive. Any other ideas?

I have checked the get info tab and it does indicate that I can read and write. I also checked the tab for the file itself and indicates the same. Still ... no go.

... bump lol

So I've been continuing to do research and have come across UID changing via terminal. Does anyone have any specific information about the best way to do that? There seems to be some conflicting information out there.

What exactly about your XP laptop died?

It sounds to me like your HDD is bad, I just recently had a 500gb external drive Formated NTFS with Windows for use with windows but i was running Windows from my iMac, the drive died and was completely useless under Windows but Mac could still read the directory structure so i could still browse the entire drive contents but trying to copy anything was a big FAIL

Eventually i brought it to a friend of mine who is a major geek, he works as some kind electrical engineer/IT guy or something but he had several identical drives at work and was able to remove the platers from mine and place them in a working one and copy all my data to a brand new drive i bought.

I guess this is a service that some companies have but it usually costs a insanely absurd amount of money to have done

hey thanks for the reply and suggestion. The HDD isn't bad I can copy things off of it and it does accept a rewrite of the MBR and such. The laptop itself that the HDD was in died. I know this because I have replaced the HDD in it and the computer will not even power up. It's most likely a power inverter problem. It isn't the power supply or the brick as I have tried a new one of those as well. So looks like I'm still stuck in the same spot. Thanks again though

Still interested in this topic guys. any more help or research hints would be appreciated. Thanks again